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Jessica Nelms

Tricia and Jim Haile work on their family-run online business, Take11.com, which catalogs movie data and provides for user input.

Photo

Click on photo to enlarge

Jessica Nelms

Since the price of taking a family to the movies often dwarfs the price of a DVD, collections of even passive movie buffs can become mammoth. For example, although Jim and Tricia Haile consider their investment in DVDs modest, their cache includes about 175 films.

CENTRAL — Three computer monitors flicker in a window-lit room filled with 1,500 books and a grand piano. There’s no music playing on the stereo. Jim Haile operates the family’s Web-based business, www.take11.com, in their Central home. Upstairs in a spare bedroom, three moderately sized servers buzz with data.

Take11.com is one part movie resource guide (think www.imdb.com) and one part social networking hub (see Facebook and MySpace). The venture also represents a mash-up of minds, specifically those of Jim, his wife Tricia and their son Mitch.

Jim does the dirty work. He programmed the 18,000 lines of coded necessary to birth and maintain Take11.

“Computers and the Web itself are tools, and Take11 is a modest experiment in trying to use those tools to help people connect,” Jim said.

Tricia, the librarian at Clemson Montessori School, brought organizational zip to the Take11 project. An avid member of the LibraryThing online community, she’s a frequent blogger, and any Web site with a social component feeds on user feedback.

“We want input from people interested in using such a site, so that it develops in the most useful directions,” Tricia said. “We also hope to eventually provide something like forums, so that members can interact with each other. Of course people who just want a list will also find Take11 useful.”

Yes, the list.

Take11 allows users to track their DVD collections, wish-list titles and movies they’ve watched, from Web-enabled cell phones, and of course, home computers. The phone access allows Take11 users to make on-the-fly decisions, whether those decisions take place at Best Buy — “Don’t we own this movie, or is that one of those 15 other films where Robert DeNiro plays a hot-headed New Yorker?” — or Blockbuster.

Currently, the Take11 database stores 25 pieces of information for each DVD. Categories included the obvious (title, director, actors) and the less obvious (running time, studio, release date). Users can widen the scope by creating their own tags, such as Western, stolen, black-and-white, for each film.

PEOPLE PRODUCT

But it’s not the data Jim believes will keep users coming back.

“Ultimately, we intend for Take11 to develop into an online community for those who love movies. We intend to provide ways for users to review, critique and discuss individual movies,” Jim said.

Mitch elaborated on the community potential.

“Take11 lets people share their collections from their blogs, on social Web sites like Facebook or wherever they keep an online presence.”

According to Jim, user feedback will play a key role in Take11’s evolution, from detecting bugs to adding features.

Launched on Sept. 13, without the benefit of a big bucks marketing campaign, Take11 currently boasts about 30 members. However, a press release was recently picked up by various online outlets, and within a year Jim hopes membership will bump into the thousands.

The more members, the more data. This strengthens Take11’s search engine’s capacity to handle trivia geek questions, like “Have Scarlet Johansson and Naomi Watts ever appeared in the same movie?” Take11 service costs $15 per year, but requires no additional software or hardware purchase.

“Once the base of users is sufficiently large, we intend to develop algorithms for offering users recommendations about movies they might enjoy, but haven’t yet seen — and recommendations about movies they might prefer to avoid,” Jim said. “One attraction will be our ability to use the database to tell users things about themselves that they did not already know.”

Since the price of taking a family to the movies often dwarfs that of a DVD, collections of even passive movie buffs can become mammoth. For example, although Jim and Tricia consider their investment in DVDs modest, their cache includes about 175 films. (They’re fans of Pixar animated features, like “Howl’s Moving Castle.”)

CONNECTIVITY

Any startup business will face struggles and advantages, and Take11 is no different. Since Mitch lives in Boston, logistics were an issue, although phone and e-mail connected the divide.

Time also presented some snags. Mitch was in the middle of remodeling his house and other business ventures; Tricia has her day job at Clemson Montessori; and Jim maintains freelance gigs as a technical writer and Web developer. (Before retiring in 2000, Jim spent 24 years teaching engineering and computer programming at Clemson University.)

Now 28 years old, Mitch has been writing code since he was 7.

Said Jim: “When I get hung up, he’s the guy I turn to. A site like this is really too complicated for one person.”

Mitch helped build Take11 from his home office in Boston, with some Offspring or George Winston blaring in the background. The rest of the work was done on flights between Beantown and San Francisco.

A Clint Eastwood fan, Mitch holds the actor’s pre-“Dirty Harry” flicks (“The Eiger Sanction,” “Where Eagles Dare,” etc.) in particular regard. Among recent titles, Mitch dug the summer smash “Iron Man” and “Firewall,” the oft-maligned Harrison Ford vehicle.

“‘Firewall’ didn't get great reviews, but the technology was accurate enough to be fun as a technology person. Harrison Ford is typing real firewall commands that are tricky to get right. I saw the movie with another hardcore technology engineer, and we were both sweating over those commands he's typing in,” Mitch said.

Family businesses can get sticky, yet, according to Mitch, the Hailes are relatively drama-free. But Tricia admits a war-of-wills occasionally comes into play.

“We are all three very stubborn people, so we had to agree to disagree,” she said.